A Film Canon

The centrepiece of Cocteau's Orphic trilogy, Orpheus provides the most elegant explanation of its perennial dream-space - the world beyond the mirror - as a realm in which the violent consummation of young male beauty can safely occur. In doing so, it draws on the eponymous myth's juxtaposition of romance and morbidity, replacing Eurydice (Marie Dea) with Death (Maria Cesares) as object of romance, and condensing the latter to a leather- clad dominatrix - a mere fetishistic potential - that, in turn, mediates the relationship between Orpheus (Jean Marais) and Cegeste (Edouard Dermithe), a young poet. Not only do Cegeste's 'fragments' only reveal their true genius (and Orpheus' paucity) after he is killed by a pair of motorcyclists in the opening scene - a distant echo of the snowball fight that haunts Cocteau's body of work - but they are broadcast through the radio of Death's car, which is kept in Orpheus' garage, thereby clarifying the proliferation of disembodied voices throughout the trilogy (culminating with Cocteau's own appearances as narrator) as so many gestures of condensation and displacement, as well as capturing a transition in the parameters of fetishism, from the textural to the technological, as if Cocteau were prescient of the extent to which the emergence of new media extends this dream-space; or, as another radio announces, addresses the fact that "the mirrors should reflect further". For this reason, the distinction between front and back of the mirror is far more fluid than in any of Cocteau's earlier films, as evinced in the quantity of crossings that are depicted (and the variety of techniques used to do so, including the use of tubs of mercury), the revelation of the place where all mirrors end as the post-war Parisian nightscape (and, more generally, the identification of the Afterlife with those area of Parisian exurbia that service its growing technological dependencies) and, most poetically, the orchestration of figures in arrangements that suggest the presence of an unseen mirror; mirror as medium.